Showing 1 - 9 of 9
The politics of taste in our election season
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/12/2025
» Hell is other people's tastes. Hell is when we passionately hate what people unconditionally love. Hell is when we can't fathom how anyone on the face of the earth can like someone or something we find revolting -- a food, a film, a style, an opening ceremony, a politician, a president.
Time for Asean films to shine
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2021
» The pandemic notwithstanding, it has been a stimulating year for Southeast Asian cinema. Reflective, heartfelt and oddball new titles from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have won major prizes or become critical favourites at international film festivals throughout 2021. Now, many of these films are coming to the big screen in Thailand as the Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2021 (BAFF) is set to open tonight.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
Memories buried in soil
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/07/2019
» Memories and war, illusory borders and invisible scars: These themes are resonant in two documentary films shown late last month at the SAC Film Festival (hosted by the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre). In the Thai documentary Din Rai Dan (Soil Without Land), a Tai Yai man in Shan state talks about his life as a waiter in Bangkok and as a soldier in his ethnic army. In the Vietnamese film The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil, a group of men in a rural village bear the indelible wounds of the Vietnam War, still stinging after 40 years.
Who is our Oscars Favourite?
B Magazine, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/02/2019
» The most important of all unimportant things, the Oscars arrive on Monday morning, Thailand time. In a year that seems more muted than usual, Hollywood's biggest jamboree has striven to stay relevant with the inclusion of blockbuster titles such as Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody, besides the more edgy and less popular films that have claimed much of the headlines, such as Roma and Green Book. While there are many cinematic awards around the world, the Oscars still seem to matter the most, and the ritual of predicting the winners is at once a frivolous parlour game and an annual survey of the vital signs of mainstream cinema. Don't bet on it, but we offer our takes here.
Through the looking glass
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/02/2019
» Tish Rivers, the woman in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, muses to the reader in the book's first pages: "I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass."
Space oddity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/12/2018
» Parking curbs, in different colours, are arranged in a pattern in a gallery, which occupies a section of a parking space. In one corner of the room are seven cardboard boxes, which contain dozens of brown, slightly dog-eared log books, handwritten by security guards and caretakers of the National Gallery, dating back to the 1990s. Dry report on daily activities fill page after page. "5pm: closed room 1-4. 5.30pm, close the office. Midnight: new shift starts. Situation normal," reads an entry from March 1998.
Writing’s on wall for our democracy
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/01/2018
» The other day I saw some graffiti in a public toilet. It read, ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short, as the popular translation goes. Like a street artist, I decided to vandalise it, scratching out and changing the first bit with my poor Latin: dictatura longa, vita brevis. Dictatorship is long, life is short.
Regime trawl for small fry no joke at all
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2018
» The big fish hardly ever gets caught, not here. Only the small, the trivial, the nonsensical fish, the clownfish especially. As in school, or in prison, the bullies never bully the big kid. They only confirm their sense of power when they go after the small guys, the nerds, even the girls.